Westside Digest

Santa Monica : RAND Honors Students

As part of its "Adopt-A-School" program, the RAND Corp. this week honored 22 Santa Monica High School students who participated in the think tank's three-month Distinguished Scholars Program.

Four of the students in the program, which teaches students the skills of public policy analysis and is taught by doctoral candidates in the RAND Graduate School, were cited for exceptional performance and received cash awards.

All 22 students were required to research and write a paper addressing some aspect of one of four topics: the environment, the pro-life/pro-choice controversy, the changing Soviet Union, and income distribution and poverty.

"It's not hard to get a high school student to make recommendations about how to solve a problem," said Richard Robinson, who coordinated the program while working on his own dissertation, "but it's hard to get them to think about why they're making those recommendations. We hope the program taught them how to look at the context of a public policy issue and how to develop appropriate measures for alternative solutions."